jacoby's Journal: Intel-Dump on Franks on Bush

I read this. Tommy Franks, former head of Central Command, said that he thinks we should've hired back the old Iraqi Army rather than forming a new one.

The United States should have quickly reformed the Iraqi army after most of its soldiers walked off the battlefield and got them "working for us," retired Gen. Tommy Franks said Tuesday.

Franks, who oversaw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, told reporters it may have taken "a couple billion dollars," but that he would have liked to have put Iraqi troops "back on the payroll right quick."

Phillip Carter of Intel-Dump says:

Still, I'm glad that you've joined the chorus of voices saying this was a bad decision. I'm surprised though, that you can campaign on the one hand for your wartime president, but criticize the decisions of that same president.

Just because Franks thinks it, that doesn't make it the right call
One of the big complaints about Afghanistan is that some Taliban warlords became Alliance warlords when the US became bombing. Wouldn't those soldiers be just as distrusted when they so easily went from the anti-US Iraq Army to the pro-US Iraqi Army. Really, in the early days of our action in Afghanistan, when we had small numbers of SF soldiers on the ground and large nubmers of AF bombers above it, we didn't really have the kind of control that would mean we could disband a warlord's forces, so we left it to the Northern Alliance and we got what we got.

It's the kind of mistake we always make
At first, you couldn't become dog-catcher in post-WWII Germany if you ever joined the Nazi party, but it is difficult to get ahead in a one-party state if you're not in the party, so the talented and the ambitious joined up, and while, at first, we of course didn't want to give power to the people we had been fighting. Eventually, we did, while ensuring that, while former Nazis were allowed, Nazism wasn't. Same thing went on in Japan.

It's a lesson learned
The State Department knows it. The Defense Department knows it. Next time we take on a nation-building mission, we'll put more consideration into which parts of the nation to dismantle first, and that lesson will persist, no matter who is president next February.